The TV died mid-show on Friday, August 28, at around 19:30. The thermometer inside my house read 38 degrees, and I had just reached for the air conditioner. Instead, darkness swallowed the room, the street, and most of Gozo with it.
I found my way to the garage and inspected the circuit breaker, suspecting a domestic fault. Everything sat in perfect order, which meant the problem lay far beyond my front door. Out in the street, only the local supermarket glowed, its generator murmuring behind the neon sign. A private business had planned for failure more seriously than the State monopoly which supplies it. Its owners protected their frozen stock because they assumed, correctly, that the grid might betray them. Trusting the State would have been more costly than their scepticism.
At 20:15 I phoned Enemalta and joined a queue of powerless customers. On loop, a recorded Maltese voice assured me that every agent remained busy. Twenty-eight minutes later, a customer care employee kindly predicted two hours of darkness, maybe more. She could not tell me what had failed, where the fault lay, or why. Nobody volunteered information that evening; residents hunted for scraps of it in the dark.
An explanation surfaced later: faults had developed on two of the three 33kV feeders supplying Gozo. Those same faults disabled one of Gozo's two distribution centres, throttling whatever capacity remained. One cable therefore carried an island of 40,000 residents through the hottest week of August. Enemalta's outage map at 20:20 showed Victoria, Xagħra, Żebbuġ, Għarb, Sannat and Xewkija in darkness. Mellieħa lost supply the same evening, so the malaise stretched across the channel as well. In Xagħra, crowds continued their pre-festa celebrations by the light of mobile phone torches. Overhead, the fireworks of the Għajnsielem feast still thundered, mocking the silent appliances below. Petards performed perfectly while the national grid buckled beneath ordinary domestic demand.
My consolation lay in a garden and a charged mobile phone connecting me to the world. Above me, a 98% moon poured soft silver light across rooftops the grid had abandoned. Spare a thought instead for elderly residents, alone in sealed flats at 38 degrees. Heat at that level kills quietly, and it starts from the old first. Businesses in those villages and Marsalforn faced a peak-season Friday evening without refrigeration, light or tills. A serious government will treat electricity during a heatwave as a matter of public health. But this newly elected government treats it as a customer care queue with a recorded apology.
Around midnight, a mobile generator appeared outside the substation on Capuchins Street. It roared into life with no regard for the sleeping street around it. Light returned at 00:20, about five hours after it vanished. I was finally able to turn on the air conditioning, but the outside generator noise persisted. In the year 2026, a European Union member state restores electricity with generators on trailers. Joseph Muscat once paraded his gas power station as the permanent answer to power cuts. Generation counts for nothing when the cables carrying it to Gozo fail two at a time. The vote counting at the power station was more meticulous than the megawatt measurements.
None of this arrived without warning, because the summer had already measured the network for us. In July, demand reached a high of 741MW, which is nearly 12% higher than the 2023 record. Malta's population grew by only 4.4% between 2023 and 2025. The National Audit Office blamed a chronic lack of investment in the high-voltage network over a decade. Auditors selected their words with precision when speaking about this government's planning. July's heatwave merely exposed a weakness which years of neglect had built into the system. Blaming the sun for a power cut insults every household that pays its bills.
Energy Minister Miriam Dalli nevertheless blamed extreme temperatures and record demand for July's outages. She equated Malta's difficulties with those experienced in Germany, France, and Italy, implying that shared problems lessened culpability. Prime Minister Robert Abela then publicly ordered her to accelerate grid works, promising a second interconnector by 2027. Promises for 2027 do not cool a single bedroom in August 2026. Days after July's chaos, Dalli asked employers and unions to propose ways of managing demand. Her officials now speak of managing consumption, a polite phrase for asking citizens to expect less. Households that purchased air conditioners will reportedly need to limit their use to keep the power grid stable. A minister who asks others how to do her job invites an obvious conclusion.
The Opposition tabled a no-confidence motion in Dalli in July, and the government's majority duly buried it. The events of Friday effectively countered the party's enthusiastic announcement about the largest ever distribution investment program. Accountability in a democracy means consequences, not communication strategies and photographed site visits. When a minister presides over repeated systemic failure, responsibility demands more than another press statement. Resignation would be a wise move for Dalli; if she declines, the Prime Minister ought to dismiss her.
Gozo's weakness has a history that extends beyond a single eventful Friday night. In July 2024, a cable fire blacked out the entire island for hours. Gozo depends entirely on feeders from Malta, with no meaningful generation of its own. Every engineer at Enemalta knows this, yet redundancy for Gozo never climbed the priority list. Officials describe cable faults; Gozitans recognise a familiar pattern that treats their island as expendable. When capacity tightens, geography decides who suffers, and Gozo sits at the end of the cable. Any second interconnector will land in Malta, while Gozo waits on the same tired feeders. Planners who ignore that detail will engineer the next Gozitan blackout with their own signatures.
Government strategists expect voters to forget, because summer grievances rarely survive until polling day. They will arrive in four years with cheques, projects and apologies, the ballot box polished and ready. Gozitans will remember the night of Friday, 28 August 2026: the heat, the silence, the diesel roar. My street counted five dark hours; Marsalforn and Għarb counted several more. We will remember the elderly neighbours who sweated through it without a garden or a generator. A government that cannot keep the lights on has no claim on our patience. It surely holds no claim whatsoever on our vote next time around.